This Shits Got To Go - An investigation into 'investigative reporting'

Wednesday, 12 June 2013

Demonising the poor so they can get away with it all

Breakfast television has become a place for the media to demonise the poor, I cannot remember if it was always this way, but every morning in the gym I glance up at the monitors and see the subtitles of someone tearing apart another poor unsuspecting victim.

Day break today, 'Benefits: Don't cut my £32,000 hand out', in big bold letters framing the agenda and then Lorraine Kelly had a woman named Clare on and made sure to highlight the fact she had seven children. Lorraine Kelly then had the nerve to say: "Thanks for coming in, a lot of people have been tweeting in to have a go at you, some in support of you, but mainly saying you take home more than they earn." Clare seemed nervous, but then you would if you knew you were on national television being put up for people to focus their anger and aggression on for the austerity and poverty that is ripping through our society at the moment. Clare's response was disappointing in that she pointed fingers at others, claiming it was unfair a family of four and a family of seven should be on the same rate, what Clare should have said is: "Yes Lorraine, it is because people like you and the rest of the prestitutes are pushing a fascist agenda to demonise poor people ahead of the next general election. You see it is easy to control us and get away with daylight robbery when you have us fighting amongst ourselves, rather than stopping to take a look and ask what you lot are up to and question the banks."

Sat alongside this poor lady was another woman, a journalist named Anne Atkins, who could not wait to get her claws out ready to strike Clare down. Sympathy she said, yes, but Anne called for imaginative ways to work from home, imaginative ways to eat by eating cheap healthy food... Is she joking? It is not cheap to eat healthily, if you want to eat crap then you can eat cheap. If you want to eat healthy then it will cost you a pretty penny.

Clare explained the tough time she is having raising one of her children who has special requirements and eventually managed to bring the story round to one of a lack of support from the government in helping her get back to work. This is something I know is a problem for families first hand when parents, often single parents, are told that it is more beneficial for them to rely on the state than to go back to work. These are people that WANT to go back to work but are being discouraged by the very people who then collate statistics, manipulate them and beat the people round the head with every day in the media. You could not make it up.

As with all news these days the situation is not taken in any context whatsoever. This story took place several hours after the BBC published an article about wage repression in the UK today. The report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said the fall in nominal wages during the recession was unprecedented. They are calling it the productivity puzzle, I would call it the wage slave conundrum.

Essentially people are not retiring and and lone parents are not withdrawing from the debt slave market at a time when we are going through the longest and deepest recession in a century. The sooner people start calling it by its real name, a depression, the sooner we can start to come to terms with dealing with the issue. The IFS said workers were better off to stay in work with lower wages rather than be unemployed. The government has said that the labour market has remained strong despite the downturn but they fail to realise that people are not staying in these wage repressed conditions through choice, they are doing so because the government have a vice like grip around our throats and are pushing their ideological austerity upon us.

Debt slaves: buying stuff we don't need, with money that's not real, to impress people we don't know.

One interesting comment from the IFS was that fewer workers today are unionised or covered by collective wage agreements and that as a result they tended to see smaller, if any, wage increases. Unfortunately many of those people that are in unions seem to be hamstrung by the weight of history and seemingly unable or unwilling to rise and make change to the world they are helping to create.
By the time I went to work the unions had largely been smashed by Thatcher and Thatcherism and the UK is now one of the few countries in Europe, who's workers are without the right to withdraw their labour, as covered by the International Labour Organisation (ILO). Unions and their members across the country today are under attack for no other reason than ideology because the corporations and our politicians do not want people to have fair and equitable living wages and conditions.
There has never been a more important time for the people to rise up, join together, stop pointing fingers at the poor and realise our problems are not the making of a few on benefits but those power hungry criminals in the city of corruption.